Spoof Of The Big Games And Players

Press, Volume CIX, Issue 31991, 19 May 1969, Page 12

Spoof Of The Big Games And Players

“And the Big Men Fly,” by Alan Hopgood. Produced by Hunter Bell for the Elmwood Playhouse. The season lasts until May 24. The performance ends at 10.25.

The liye theatre in the suburbs will be able to compete with movies and television programmes if it can come up with more plays like this one. It is a spanking spoof on the promoters, players and spectators of Australian Rules Football, but for this code one is invited to read any sport which encourages its supporters to lose their sense of proportion. The from - log - cabin - to-White-House plot adds some homely moralising to the comedy. A very basic farmer from a primitive farm is inveigled into going to Melbourne to play football. His sensational kicking ability and physical stamina make him. an irresistible match winner. Television, businessmen, and fans crowd in on him to tempt him from country simplicity to the city world of shoddy virtues and consumer materialism. All he has to hold to is his mate (a fading horse), his woman (an unspoiled maiden), and a family feud (a local remedy .for boredom). What happens is largely predictable and a little too heavily underlined, but it is nevertheless entertainment with a distinctive flavour—the wit that comes from Australian exaggeration; the novelty of the setting; the quaintness of the personalities; and the homely drawl with which the 25 episodes in the continuing drama are delivered. Jack Baird’s farmer-hero was a masterpiece of rustic understatement, with Sue Ryan’s female-mate as a sweetly comic, sometimes nicely pathetic, soundingboard.

The city adversaries, played by Brian Deavoll and Campbell Mackay, were strongly

matched for all’s-fair-in-love-and-sport nastiness. John Bateman’s commentator was suitably smarmy. The success of the production began with a cunningly economical setting which allowed for a farmhouse, an office, part of a grandstand, and a television studio—all on a tiny stage. The resources

of the Playhouse are, for its size, certainly a marvel of ingenuous manipulation. Hunter Bell had developed his characterisations tellingly and had kept the play moving, without ever achieving realism. Sound effects, from shooting to crowd noises and reactions, were rather colourless. This modern fairy-tale will have you laughing often, and will even give you something to think about before the Big Games are with us. This .play is a New Zealand premiere and its tremendous audience appeal with recent Australian audiences will surely be just as great in New Zealand. Another significant achievement for the Elmwood Players.— P.R.S.